Linger to Look

The last time I was able to attend the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop at Hindman in the summer of 2015, I came home with a righteous stack of participant and instructor books.  Around my drumming, performing and writing schedule, I’ve been gradually reading my way through the stack. Today, with morning coffee, I enjoyed the intriguing full-length poetry collection by Sabne Raznik entitled Linger to Look. I’m sorry it took me so long to get to this unusual, yet cohesive collection.

The over-arching themes of Linger to Look seem to be desire, belonging, transformation, and loss. Many of the poems are spoken in the voice of a woman who longs to dance and break free from the bonds that tether her to dusty reality. Horse, bird, water, and stone images abound. Musical use of language led me to finally read many of the poems aloud to myself to further experience the poet’s skill with sound.

Interspersed throughout the collection are the poet’s sketches of belly dancers and expressionistic photographs by Jan McCullough.  These interludes of visual art weave the thematic threads of poignant lyric and narrative poems to the more experimental collage pieces like “possible: raha,” a 9-page romp into the abstract.

I was set to work looking up many of the poet’s allusions to belly dancing, quotes in Hebrew and Aramaic, and references to middle eastern culture.  While these brief forays into research did not affect my overall understanding of the poems, I would have appreciated a few footnotes on the more obscure references to musicians who play belly dancing music. But then, I might have missed listening to some of that fine music on youtube.

Linger to Look, published in 2015, by Sabne Raznik is a dance of musical language and metaphysical imagery, swirling in experimentation and shimmering in the jingling of human heart.

The Seed of Me

Since poet, Karen George dedicates her latest chapbook of poems to her grandmother and mother, and since a photo of a mother and bride adorn the cover, reflected in the intimacy of a dresser mirror, I was prepared to read this group of poems as personal intergenerational legacy.  What I was not prepared for was how completely a poet's craft can transform the personal into the magical and universal. 

The Seed of Me, 2015, from Finishing Line Press is George's third chapbook. She is also the author of another title from Finishing Line, Into the Heartland,  2011 and Inner Passage, 2014, from Red Bird Chapbooks. Her first full collection, Swim Your Way Back was published by Dos Madres Press in 2014. 

I read The Seed of Me expecting a tribute to the poet's mother and grandmother for nurturing a creative spirit. Instead, I read about light bodies, broken dolls, missing spleens, birthmarks, motorcycle rides, bowling balls, and the dead among the living.  I read about blisters and  visions.  I read about the moon.

One of my favorites from this chapbook is "The Moon After a Poetry Jam." I love it for its musical language and magical  image. Here are just a few lines to let you know what I mean:

"Over the main road the moon hangs low, pregnant with rise,

and I unmoor to meet her in inky air. Down the winding

hill she hides behind tree clumps of humid-heavy leaves,

her glow a halo luminous above the crowns."

Another poem awash in magic imagery is entitled "Transformations, the Suspension Bridge."  In it, the poet recalls driving from Kentucky to Ohio over the Suspension Bridge on the day her grandma died:

"Parallel strings of light

transposed

to strands of DNA, pulsing.

Streetlamps flared,

floated from their posts,

drew together like magnets.

When the current entered,

I no longer heard

tires from the bridge,

felt the wheel vibrate,

smelled winter or river.

The moment peeled

forward, into place,

and lamps returned

to their posts

and subdued states."

In several poems,  the speaker engages with something beyond everyday experience--a current that both transcends and transforms time.

The poet recognizes her sensory connection to the extraordinary early in her life and describes her experience in the poem from which she draws her chapbook's title.  The poem is "The Dead Live at Hemlock Lodge, Natural Bridge, Kentucky."

"The first time  I felt the dead   among the living.  I was ten, on a 

family vacation.   The dining room air   dusk-heavy, as though we

trudged through waist-high water.   The dark wood of tables, chairs,

wall and ceiling beams   dimmed the midday light from the bank of

windows.  I neither saw nor heard the passed, only felt their current,

a pool.   No fear or torment, more like the salve of walking in woods

among tunneling insects   and roots.   I knew not to tell, as I knew

not to question   the nuns in school.   To keep beliefs and doubts

hidden.  I studied my parents' and sisters' faces, and buried the secret

in my soul. Not the place they said sin tarnished, but where the seed 

of me   burrowed, thinned, and branched."

The Seed of Me honors both George's mother and her grandmother through stunning universal imagery that connects even the most personal family story to the cosmic current.

This review aired in April 2015 on AROUND CINCINNATI, WVXU.org.  There were a few extra sentences about a then upcoming event for the poet that has already passed.  If you'd like to listen while reading, here is a link.

Come and Go, Molly Snow

Come and Go, Molly Snow is a book about grief, redemption, and music. Published in paperback this past October by The University Press of Kentucky, the novel was Mary Ann Taylor-Hall’s first, garnering praise as a hardback from The Los Angeles Times, Publishers Weekly, and People Magazine--just to name a few sources of acclaim. There was even talk of a movie version that ultimately collapsed under the weight of a bad script. That’s unfortunate, because the story is intrinsically cinematic in its flashback format, capturing everything from atmospheric breakdown scenes to spirited bluegrass music “breakdowns” through the plucky voice of Carrie Mae Mullins, an extraordinary woman fiddler who enters the mostly male world of bluegrass music.

The story begins with Carrie reflecting on how she ended up on a farm near Lexington, KY recovering from a breakdown, barely trusted by her two elder hosts to wield a knife for pitting peaches. The author uses the frame story of Carrie’s recovery to reveal gradually one of the major questions of the novel: how does one get beyond the death of a child?

The challenge of writing about grief hinges on the writer’s ability to make the inner landscape of a character accessible to the reader. For Judith Guest, author of Ordinary People, that challenge was met by alternating the inner suffering of two major characters, the grieving father and son. Both tell the story in first person, letting the reader piece together the tragedy beneath the surface from two viewpoints. While most first person narrators are by definition “unreliable,” as the reader only gets one subjective point of view, Taylor-Hall builds trust in Carrie Mae the same way J.D. Salinger had readers believing Holden Caulfield, by creating a character with a distinct, authentic voice. We believe and feel her descent into the monotone of grief because we have already heard her passionate voice describe the myriad emotions, sounds and sensations of playing in an ensemble.

In fact, music permeates the entire novel. Carrie describes her attraction to the handsome band leader, Cap, through their harmony singing, when she says,“harmony’s all there is or needs to be, when it’s right” and characterizes her often absent father’s depth of blues as “oh, my daddy was not easy listening.” The music even extends into Carrie’s thoughts on language when she considers the onomatopoeia of one word:

“Cease--what a word, like the breath going out of everything.”

And the music of Taylor-Hall’s language as it filters through Carrie set me jotting down quotes I wanted for later, just because they were surprising and succulent. As Carrie struggles with whether or not there is something after this life, the task in front of her of slicing peaches produces this insight:

“The gold, moist slices, red at the inner edge, gather the light to them. They look like light itself, as if to say, ‘You want to believe in something, believe in peaches.’”

The other characters in this novel serve to guide Carrie toward her eventual path through their examples--good and bad--and through their ample humanity. The sumptuous Cap, heart-throb to the masses, yet clueless about his own desires, the hardworking, nurturing granny, Ona, with her own tragic loss, and the ravenous-for-adventure retired banker, Ruth, who seeks the Holy Land and just maybe another fling, Pearls Girls, the all-women band formed by friends, Louis, the hard-driving banjo picker who resents Carrie’s “invasion” of his all-male band, the lively Molly Snow herself, who steps in and out of the narrative bringing Carrie both joy and pain, and spectres of all kinds who haunt Carrie in their longings, including her parents and a ghost called Little Lady Kidwell.

This novel poses many questions about the nature of existence, but thankfully leaves the answering to each of us on our own paths with our own casts of colorful characters. Come and Go, Molly Snow is a book for those who ask the important questions, but don't expect the answers to be easy.